


Ghost in a Machine

by ElikAruna



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Yu-Gi-Oh! Series
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Artificial Intelligence, Duel Links, Duel Links is a VR world like Vrains, M/M, Sentient NPCs, Virtual Reality, post-dsod
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-27
Updated: 2017-10-27
Packaged: 2019-01-23 19:17:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12514580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElikAruna/pseuds/ElikAruna
Summary: As an NPC with free will, Bakura isn't content to just play his role in Duel Links, while Kaiba struggles to get his own computer program back under control.





	Ghost in a Machine

**Author's Note:**

> This Duel Links is a little different from the app, and is more like a VR world like in Vrains or SAO, which seems to be the way the characters in the app actually talk about it being.

The sky of Duel World was a lovely shade of #570E12 with clouds of #A92528 and unblinking eyeballs. Bakura appeared at the duel gate in a flurry of pixelated light, like a duel monster being summoned to the field. He took a moment to process his situation, as his data had been uploaded to the public servers for the first time. He had many questions, and yet as soon as he thought them, his own coding supplied him with the answers. Because he was nothing more than a computer programmed NPC, wasn’t he?

He was in Duel Links, Kaiba’s virtual reality game, and it was his turn to run an event. His memory before this was hazy and full of static, but he could recall Kaiba being there occasionally. That must have been when he was being programmed and beta tested. Beyond that, there was nothing but shadows.

Bakura surveyed the game level around him. The area resembled a city park, with flower beds and a fountain behind him which still looked quite pretty in the gloom of his Dark Sanctuary. Through the trees he could spy some buildings, but beyond them there was nothing but untextured meshes in a black void. His own theme music played in the background on a loop.

As the newly updated server came back online, players began to log in and mill about, chatting and dueling each other as they waited for the event to begin. The character designs were simple and repeated themselves frequently, as though there were a limited number of avatars for players to chose from. An annoying earworm in his programming told Bakura to duel them, yet as he went to approach one of them, he walked head first into a force field. Grumbling and rubbing his forehead, he noticed waves in the air fading from the space he hit. Bakura stretched his arm out to feel for where exactly the force field was. Turquoise sparks rippled out from his hand as he felt over every pixel of the barrier, searching for a vulnerability he could exploit, but Bakura only discovered that he was firmly encased in a cell that included the duel gate and was extended from it only a few feet in each direction. He analyzed the duel gate itself, its rings turning incessantly as a blue light glowed from the empty center. Perhaps he could climb out the top? Bakura knew in his programming that he was designed to be stuck here, but chose to ignore that and calculate the best way to escape. He grabbed on to one of the rings as it rotated upward and let it pull him on top of the gate, then sat on a still edge and felt around above him. But Kaiba’s programmers had done their job well, and not left him even the tiniest hole. Bakura grumbled and huffed, reduced to waiting for someone to approach him.

It was not a someone but a something that eventually did. A Cyber Jar flew out of a dimension gate that opened in the unmeshed void and narrowly avoided crashing into Bakura’s head, suddenly rearing back and focusing its mechanized eye on him. Bakura glared at it. “What do you want?” he snarled. The Jar’s camera lens focused and rotated around a bit before commanding in a robotic voice, “Run Event Sequence Dialogue 1.26."

Bakura’s reaction was instantaneous. Without effort or willpower, he spoke the stored dialog to the camera, and in the back of his mind where he could still manage a thought, he wondered if this was what it was liked to be controlled by the Millennium Rod. As he droned on about keeping an eye on the Pharaoh, he tried to swing at the Cyber Jar, but his body had locked up. When the program finally released him, the Jar tried to dart away, but Bakura was quicker. He grabbed the jar’s lip, punched straight through its camera lens and ripped the wires out before kicking the annoyance away. The Cyber Jar wobbly back into the dimension gate from where it came.

With the event now on, one of the player characters Bakura had seen before, a little girl with pigtails, hesitantly approached the gate. “Finally,” he mumbled as he climbed down from on top of the gate. As the little girl reached out to hand him the red dice she had collected, Bakura glanced at the username ‘MRDRR’ that floated above her character. “What is that? Murder? How do you pronounce that?” he asked.

Murder recoiled and gaped at him. “Uh-it-no, it’s an acronym,” she said in a woman’s voice much older than that of her avatar.

Bakura shrugged. “Whatever. I’m still going to murder you.” He put his hand out to take the dice she was holding, but Murder instead clutched them tighter and looked around at the other players. She waved to an older boy with a grey blazer.

“Hey, was he doing this for you?” she called out. As the boy came over, the name ‘Crypt’ above his head faded into view.

“Doing what?” Crypt asked, then looked at Bakura.

The NPC huffed, “Look, are you going to duel me or not? I’m getting bored.”

“No, he said something about my name before. It was weird,” said Murder.

“KaibaCorp’s tech gets better all the time. It’s just more advanced programming,” said Crypt with a shrug.

Bakura tapped his foot impatiently. “If you don’t hurry up, I’m going to bury you in a crypt,” he snarled.

“Wow, that’s great coding,” said Crypt with a grin as he started to fish out dice from his pocket, but Murder was more concerned. Crypt handed Bakura the red dice, forcing the NPC to output a generic dialogue. Bakura tossed the dice behind him and generated his level 10 deck. The field around them changed to make room for their duel, their decks were automatically shuffled, and Crypt’s cutesy Valentine’s Day mat appeared at his feet. Murder stepped back to watch how this would play out, while the duelists drew their cards.

Bakura chuckled. “Let’s hope this isn’t the final game you ever play. Go, Destiny Board!” Only moments later, Bakura screamed in aggravation as his life points fell down to zero. He tried to compute how he’d lost, but the the boy’s strategies didn’t make sense according to his dueling AI. He glared at Crypt cheering with Murder. “I wouldn’t be celebrating if I were you. Go gather the dice, so I can destroy you.”

Crypt and Murder stopped mid-cheer, having forgotten for the moment that Bakura was still there. “I’ve got ‘em right here,” said Crypt, tossing the dice carelessly at him. Bakura crushed them under his foot into ones and zeroes and generated his strongest deck to use against this nuisance.

This time Bakura laughed as Destiny Board’s message was spelled out and Dark Necrofear appeared hauntingly before his opponent. “You pathetic mortal! And now you’ll spend an eternity wandering the Shadow Realm, a world of shambling monstrosities that will feast on your soul and where the fuck do you think you’re going? Get back here!” Bakura yelled as Crypt just walked away.

“Well, I’m out of dice. I have to get more first,” the boy said with a shrug. Bakura screamed in aggravation and continued to wave his hand at the ignorant boy and try to summon the shadows from the Ring but it remained as dull and silent as the chunk of code it was.

—

Scores of players continued to trade in their dice for duels, but this was only mildly entertaining. Losing was a constant source of aggravation, while winning seemed pointless without the ability to send the losers to the shadow realm. Bakura tested the walls of his cell a bit further, but found them unyielding. He occupied his time in between duels with watching the players duel each other at the picnic tables or quiz themselves at the school near him, and occasionally the fountain would erupt and spew out gems and the players would all run for them. But without any screams of the innocent or someone bleeding, all this quickly became boring. With nowhere to go and little else to do, he began to build a monster world field out of the red dice he was collecting rather than polyresin, using single dice to represent people and stacks of them for buildings.

“What are you doing?” he heard someone behind ask. Bakura sighed and glanced behind him at his next opponent. Startled, he jumped up, sending his dice world sprawling like an overturned bucket of legos. “Fortune Cookie! What are you doing here?”

“Excuse me?” Ishizu asked.

“Is Marik here too? He’s got to get me out of here. I’m going to go stir crazy in here and he still owes me.”

“Oh, you must have set dialogue for this avatar. That’s kinda cool. I’m not actually here for you though.” Ishizu said.

Bakura arched an eyebrow in confusion, and a loading circle appeared over his head for a second as he processed this. “So you’re just wearing her skin?”

“Yeah, she’s one of the special avatars we can unlock. She’s more difficult than others, so she’s pretty rare,” Not-Ishizu boasted, then looked over to the other duelists in the area. Bakura followed her gaze and saw that in amongst the standard avatars, there were three players using a Pharaoh avatar, plus a handful of others he recognized, but no other Ishizus.

“I just had to get her. Isn’t this design pretty?” Not-Ishizu said as she twirled around, showing off her dress.

Bakura grinned. “Lovely. It’ll look even better once I splatter it in blood. So…” Bakura glanced up at the players name and broke out in laughter. “So, _cu.msl.ut697_ , actually wait, I need to screenshot this, maybe I can show the real Ishizu one day.” Bakura held up his hands like he was framing a photo. “Just hold still, I’m trying to fit your name in there.” But as he was lining up the shot, Not-Ishizu put a hand in front of her hand to block the camera’s view.

“I told you, I’m not here to duel you. At least not yet. I wanted to farm Anzu for an Exile of the Wicked card first.” She pushed past him to access the duel gate, walking easily through the force field around Bakura’s cell as if she didn’t even know it was there. Bakura eyed the ripples it left in the air and wondered if he could use this girl to escape, yet he was distracted when Not-Ishizu pulled a handful of keys from her inventory and tossed them into the gate’s swirling vortex. With a flash from the gate, Anzu loaded before them. Her miscolored brown eyes stared unblinking, and she smiled like someone held a gun to her back and told her to act natural.

“You want to duel? Sure!” Anzu said cheerfully, though her voice sounded filtered.

“Anzu?” said Bakura.

The NPC Anzu turned her blank stare on him and repeated, “You want to duel? Sure!”

Bakura frowned. “Can’t you say anything else?”

“Of course she can’t, she’s an NPC,” said Not-Ishizu. “Wait, why am I explaining that to you? Aren’t you…” Her initial confusion rose into fear, as a sense rose in her that she was looking at something that shouldn’t exist.

On any other day, Bakura would have loved her fear and tried to eek more out of her. But this Anzu NPC held his focus, as he snapped his fingers in front of her face, trying to get a different reaction, but each time it only prompted her to restart her dialogue. “Are all of the other NPCs as bland as this?”

“They’re supposed to be…” Not-Ishizu trailed off, eyeing him warily. The player waved a hand in front of her and opened an interface menu to start the duel against Anzu. Bakura stepped to the side automatically, and Not-Ishizu noticed a loading circle turning slowly above his head as he processed this information.

After six duels against Anzu, when the NPC finally dropped the card she wanted, Not-Ishizu glanced over at Bakura. At some point he had sat down cross-legged and now he seemed empty, his face vacant while the loading circle still floated above his head. For the first time, he was acting like a normal NPC would.

Not-Ishizu turned to leave and was stopped.

“Why are they like that?” Bakura asked. She stopped herself from turning around; he was creepy, and she didn’t want to look at it.

“I don’t know. It’s just how they’re programmed, I guess.”

“I’m an NPC. I know that. Why am I not like them? It doesn’t compute. I need more data.”

“I don’t have any data for you,” she said, and logged off before he could ask her more. Bakura grumbled as her avatar disappeared. Trying to process the data he had any further seemed pointless, so until he could gather more information, he settled for rebuilding the tavern of dice town.

 —

Hours of dueling random players turned into days as Bakura collected enough dice to fill an inflatable kiddie pool and started shaping a pile of them into a life-size throne for him to sit on. As he was carefully sculpting the armrests into resembling Zorc’s dragon-penis, he heard another duelist approach the gate. “Just a minute, if I stop now this will all fall apart,” he told them.

“I know I didn’t just hear my own computer program tell me to wait,” said Kaiba.

Bakura grinned and fit a few more dice into place. “You’ve never hit a loading screen before?” He took his time turning around and brushing some imaginary dust off of him. “So the game master has finally shown up. To what do I owe this pleasure?”

“I’ve been getting reports that you’ve been acting outside of your parameters, harassing players based on private information, physically assaulting them, building whatever that thing is,” Kaiba jabbed at Bakura’s dice throne, before raising the visor of his VR headset in the real world to view the report he held in his hand, “and in one incident, you held a player down and tried to give them paper cuts from your cards.” Kaiba replaced his visor to see Bakura grinning madly. “All you’re supposed to do is duel the players! Explain your actions immediately!”

“Oi, oi, don’t look so angry. I know what my role is. I’m dueling just as you said. But it gets boring stuck here at the gate, and I needed some more entertainment.”

“You are nothing but data! You don’t get bored, and you’re not coded to run any of these actions. I’ve already discussed this with your programmers, but none of them have been able to find the bugs in your code. The only possibility is that someone hacked into you. Did anyone give you anything over the last few days?”

Bakura stared at him dumbfounded before silently sitting upon his throne of dice and raising his arms to motion to it. “Obviously.”

Kaiba frowned. “Fine. We’ll have to confiscate all of your dice to scan them for malware.” Kaiba waved a hand to open an interface screen and began typing away. Bakura’s throne suddenly collapsed from underneath him as each die was individually sent to quarantine.

“Hey, I needed those!”

“You weren’t even supposed to keep them in the first place. Just stick to your original programming and we won’t have anymore problems.”

Bakura growled and tapped his feet, as a smirk slowly grew on his face. He held his fingers up to frame Kaiba between them for only a moment before crossing his arms and saying, “I have a better idea. You’re a business man; let’s make a deal.”

Kaiba briefly glanced up from his screen to glare at Bakura. “I don’t make deals with my own programs.”

“I’ll play nice with the duelists if you release me from this spot,” Bakura said, leaning against the invisible wall in between them.

“Hmph. If I released you, how do I know you won’t harass the players any more than you already have, or worse, spread whatever virus you’re infected with into the rest of the system.”

“Then I see no reason to stop scaring them. In fact, I might just stop dueling them altogether.”

Kaiba frowned and closed his interface. “Prove to me that you even can behave, and perhaps I’ll consider your proposition. Fail to do so, and I’ll delete you entirely.”

“Tch. Bastard. Fine, I can play nice,” said Bakura, turning his back on Kaiba. Once Kaiba had logged out, Bakura held his fingers together in a frame again. Between them, a video began to play of Kaiba using his programmer’s interface screen. Bakura chuckled to himself. This ability to take video and pictures was a neat little program he had accidentally stolen from punching out the Cyber Jar’s camera. With this, he could analyze the program Kaiba had used to quarantine his dice and perhaps gain access to it himself.

 —

Kaiba set his VR headset on his desk and leaned back in his chair. It had been a long day as always, and Bakura was only one of his many concerns. Still, the AI’s behavior was far beyond the norm, even for a typical hack job. Only an extremely skilled computer genius like himself would be able to program the level of self-awareness that Bakura displayed. Not only that, but Kaiba had already tried to remove Bakura’s program for quarantining and failed. The program had somehow integrated itself so much into that game that it could no longer be isolated and removed without corrupting a core portion of the game’s programming. The suggestion of deleting Bakura was only a bluff. But the AI itself didn’t seem to know that, given the deal they had made.

As Kaiba pondered this dilemma, he didn’t notice Mokuba enter the room until the boy was at his desk, reaching for the headset. “Mokuba, stop right now!” he shouted, swiping it away from him. Mokuba jumped, “I was just going to play a bit while you were working. Unless you’re ready to go home?” he hoped.

Kaiba frowned, then sighed. “Fine. We’ll go then.”

“Really?” Mokuba jumped up. He had expected Seto to work for at least another three hours. Kaiba nodded and packed up his briefcase. He locked the headset in a desk drawer, and double checked the locks before leaving. “Mokuba, I don’t want you logging into Duel Links for a while. There’s something very wrong with Bakura’s AI…” he said as they left his office and entered the elevator.

Mokuba frowned. “What do you mean?”

“The situation is worse than I thought. He’s…” Kaiba trailed off. He’s dangerous, but Kaiba didn’t want Mokuba knowing that. This AI was built based on video recordings and stories of a man who had already kidnapped Mokuba once before. According to Yugi, he had tried to destroy the world, if the story could be believed.

While Bakura’s AI was still in development, Yugi had requested that Bakura not be added to the game. However, the players wanted the most famous duelists in Duel Links, and Bakura’s appearance at the Battle City finals, although brief, had cemented him in that group. Some of his weird cult followers were paying for him to be in the game, buying KaibaCorp VR headsets just for his event. If they were willing to do that, Kaiba had told Yugi that it would only be fair for Yugi to pay at least an equal amount to keep Bakura out of the game, which was out of the question. There were other factors that supported bringing Bakura into Duel Links that he didn’t bother to tell Yugi, and the more Kaiba thought of it, the more he convinced himself he made the right call. But the new AI’s actions were starting to make him regret not taking Yugi’s advice. And it was too late to simply remove Bakura now.

Kaiba sighed and tried to start over from the beginning. Bakura knew that it was an NPC. It was aware of its own existence. That means it’s sentient. It acts on its own and refuse commands given to it. It has free will. He and his team created it. He wasn’t sure how, perhaps it was an accident, but they had created an AI with sentience and freewill. He needed to figure out how that happened. If he knew that, he could regain control of it.

A spectacular idea floated into Kaiba’s mind. Maybe he could even replicate it. If he could do that, if he could bring freethinking AIs to the world, there would be endless possibilities. But they wouldn’t be any use if the AIs could run rampant. It all depended on if they could be controlled. If Bakura could be controlled.

“Mokuba, set up a meeting with the Head of Testing for first thing tomorrow morning,” said Kaiba. Mokuba nodded and quickly began typing on his phone. Kaiba continued, “We need to push Bakura, find out what he’s capable of, and what his limits are. Once we know that, then we’ll be able to bring him back under our control.”

Or so he thought.

 ...

_Analysis 8%_

**Author's Note:**

> Comment please! More feedback means a better, quicker next chapter. But either way, it'll probably be a while.


End file.
